As of today May 2, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are asked to voluntarily submit an online copy of their work to PubMed Central (www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov).

According to the NIH policy summary, the NIH "requests and strongly encourages all NIH-funded investigators to make their peer-reviewed author's final manuscripts available to other researchers and the public at the NIH National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central (PMC) immediately after the final date of journal publication. At the time of submission, authors are given the option to release their manuscripts at a later time, up to 12 months after the official date of final publication. NIH expects that only in limited cases will authors deem it necessary to select the longest delay period."

Some of you may remember an article I posted on my blog on April 25 from Library Journal, "Life After NIH" about Open Access (OA) specifically dealing with SPARC and NIH. Stevan Harnad, criticizes the NIH policy as not truly OA, but back access to older articles.

In the April 28, 2005 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine, the perspective Public Access to NIH-Funded Research by Robert Steinbrook looks at the issue and discusses some areas of confusion to authors.

The subject of Open Access is a very charged topic, but then throw in the issue of taxpayer access to publicly funded government research and you have added even more coals to the fire of an already hot debate.

One thing is for sure, it will be interesting to see how the NIH's policy works. Steinbrook states, "As the public-access policy takes effect, there are high expectations for quick movement toward timely availability of all publications from NIH-supported research. PubMed Central, however, could soon receive 5000 papers a month, or only a few hundred. It should rapidly become obvious whether the policy is working as the NIH - and Congress - intended."

Only time will tell

For more articles on OA in the medical community check out these from BMJ (thanks Medlib)

• Open access, and proud of it. Fiona Godlee BMJ 2005;330,
• Identifying outcome reporting bias in randomised trials onPubMed: review of publications and survey of authors. An-Wen Chan, Douglas G Altman BMJ 2005;330:753,
• Perceptions of open access publishing: interviews withjournal authors. Sara Schroter, Leanne Tite, Richard Smith BMJ 2005;330:756
• Commentary: Open access publishing: too much oxygen? Jeffrey K Aronson BMJ 2005;330:759